Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. We're going to start a small series in emotional self-regulation, how we can be at our best when our kids really are at their worst. And I want to start this small series of three or four podcasts with a simple little story.
And this story I always think of as never pull on a tangle. And where this comes from is that when I was a teacher and school counselor, I loved to teach games to children. One of my great loves is teaching games and helping children socially and emotionally via a game.
Kids who can't play so well, who won't play, who dominate play. So much of cooperation and social learning happens, of course. So it's something I love to do anyway.
We would run down to the shed where all the equipment was kept, a little kind of garden shed thing. And in the shed was some rope and we would set out this rope and that was the boundary of our chasing game or whatever game we're playing. We needed boundaries with some of these kids because they would rather run to London and get caught, right? So I had a big winder, a big garden like hose winder and we'd wind up this rope and we put it in the shed.
But when I came back to the shed, my dear and lovely but messy colleague would often forget and run things over a little bit with his class and he'd just throw all the rope. And this is like 200 meters of rope, right, plastic rope into the shed. And it was the hugest tangle.
Okay, so my children, rather than saying, oh no, they would say, yes. And they would send two children up, whoever's turn it was next, up into the top floor of the building, up into this little, they called it the tower, a little balcony there. And they'd lean over the balcony, we'd get the rope out and then we'd say, go.
And we would time how long it took us to untangle the rope. They called it the tangly game. And so one thing we learned was that you never pull on a tangle.
You just open up more space. You open it up, you open it up, you keep opening. And the children up above in the tower would be shouting down, open it up a little bit more there.
Rowan, don't pull on it. Because it was actually Rowan who often would, I'm not making that up, he would. It's just his temperament, he just had to pull on this knot.
And so everyone kept a close eye on Rowan. And we would untangle. We would untangle it and open it up and open it up.
And eventually, it would just start to be very obvious where the tangles were. And very obvious what ropes needed to be flipped this way or that way. And you could see where the gnarly bits were rather than it all being gnarly.
You can see where the metaphor is going, right, maybe? And then it would untangle. And the kids would run down from the tower. We would check our time and see if we'd broken our record.
Now the reason I wanted to mention this funny little story right at the get-go of this short series in emotional self-regulation is that when we're feeling dysregulated and likewise, therefore, it sets the kids off, or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe they're not doing well, or a child is not doing well, or a couple or two or three of them, or a whole class if you're a teacher, but things aren't going well. What we can do far too quickly is try to get in there and sort things out a little bit like the previous podcast, just the one last week, suggested.
Allow time. Don't go poking at it. Don't go pulling at it.
And don't go poking at ourselves either, and don't go beating ourselves up that we're getting frustrated or even angry. Just allow space. Open it up.
Open it up. It's just like another metaphor is like a massage therapist. If you've got a really sore shoulder, for example, a good massage therapist will often, not always, but very often work on your lower back, work on your arm, work on your neck.
Just work on creating space, creating space, so that the shoulder itself can just regulate and get back into shape, and then they might work on that then. What we're doing through this series of emotional self-regulation is that we're creating space. We're creating space for healing, and we're creating space for our frustrations to be able to soothe, self-soothe, and calm, so that our children likewise can co-regulate.
And this tendency we have in modern culture to go right at a problem and want to get it sorted out right away, and because we're frustrated, we've got stuff to do, we're going to work this out right now, often leads to a situation elevating more and more and more. And so as the previous podcast suggested, just giving this space, hitting the pause button, training kids up, coaching them to know that this is what we do in our family. We all take time to calm down, dad or mom or guardian included.
We're just going to sit right on down, and we're going to take some time to calm down. It's not just the kids that need to do that, it's us, and if we can coach our kids up to accept that this is frustrating for everyone, me included, your dad, your mom included, this is really frustrating, and we're just going to take some time to calm on down. We're not going to try and work things out.
The first thing we're going to do is just sit right on down. We can do just some projects, you can do some reading. Don't get a phone out, don't get your phone or laptop, that's one thing I highly recommend against doing, but it's just a calm down time.
To be honest, that we're not very regulated at the moment with our kids, just to be able to say, you know what, this is frustrating for everyone, it's gotten really noisy, that's frustrating for me too because I'm trying to get supper together, and this is just not going well. It might seem so basic, but it's almost counterculture. The culture is saying, get in there, sort it out, get it worked out quickly, and move on.
That's pulling on a tangle, because the kids are already gnarly, they're already in a tangle, and then we're getting involved in the tangle, we're even adding more to the tangle. Rather than do that, and we can say to kids, take deep breaths and all that, but honestly, one of the best things to do is just to take time and just say, we're going to work this out. I'm just going to sit right on down now, and just take that very short period of time.
One of the other ways to take time, if that's hard and that might not work, is to bring the kids on over, and just to shift, and not pull on a tangle, by telling a little I remember when story. Now, in a previous podcast, we take a deeper dive into this, so I'll just review it now, but let's say, like I said before, you're making supper, then the I remember when story can help soothe everything. With kids of a lot of different ages, just voicing it differently, if they're a 12 year old, or a 5 year old, or whatever age, but saying, come on over, sit at the counter, just be with me for a minute, just be here, be with me.
I remember, do you know what, I was thinking today, I remember when your dad was just a little bit older than you, and do you know he built a tree house with his big brother, but his big brother wouldn't always let him in the tree house. His big brother was a little bit bossy with the tree house. Now, you only have to tell a story about bossiness, and things that didn't work out, and dad's life, or your life, or things from when your own child was a baby, they're ones they love as well, and you can feel the co-regulation, you can start to feel that you're not pulling on the knot anymore.
I think you're in the very early stages of sorting out the tangle, you're not really going in that direction yet, but you are creating the conditions to be able to go back and work out what was going wrong, and work out how to put it right. But the first thing to do is to take the time, tell a story, shift the direction, but don't go pulling on the tangle. That's the thing I find is, I want to say never works, but I personally have never found it to work, when you go in and you say we've got to get this sorted out, you're under a time pressure and so on, and then the thing blows up, and you spend so much more time trying to sort it out than if you had of just taken that 5-10 minutes to calm down, tell an I remember when story, sit beside a child, get a project board down, project boards were covered in another episode of this podcast, I love project boards, they're little ongoing projects on a tray that you can just get the project board down, now a child might be too grumpy to play with a project board, but just the fact that you've got it down, and just the fact that it's there, and they can just look at it, he, she, or they can look at it and remember happier times, just the fact that if they're a 6-year-old and they've built a modelling beeswax farm, and just the fact that they can look at it, remembering that they built that, that also helps start to create the conditions for untangling the rope, does it untangle the rope, not much, but it creates the condition for it, and that's why I wanted to make this our first episode in this series, because it's about creating the right conditions for being able to do that.
I wanted to just round off there, and remind you, if you're at all interested in taking a deeper dive into this, that we have a care professionals course coming right on up on July 27 and 28, where we'll go very deeply into how we can help ourselves, but particularly help others, if you're working in the care professions, teaching, and any other care professions, how you can help the good folk that you support, the adults you support, be better emotionally regulated, and you can see a link to that right on the Simplicity Parenting website, right in the trainings tab, it's one of the main tabs or pages, and it's included in the show notes. So if you're at all interested in how to help people you work with and around you, be better emotionally self-regulated, we would love to see you. It's a care professional seminar that's run live online via Zoom, I personally facilitate it, it's two days, Saturday and Sunday, three days, three hours on each of those days, and we would love to see you take part in that.
There can't be enough people helping others be able to stay at their best when the kids are at their worst. And if you're listening to this podcast after this seminar has taken place, we run it every year, so just go to the interest list, click on that, and we'll let you know as soon as this care professional seminar comes up again. Okay, I sure hope that was helpful.
Bye-bye for now.
